Sadly, could not get past the first chapter. I found it too confusing and frustrating. Characters doing things I didn’t understand and a world that was bewildering. I’m generally ok with such things but this was just too much.

In the far-distant future, Humanity has splintered into a Prism of related species, with the Amaranthine at the top of the pyramid: a small number of immortals who rule ever more precariously, keeping their power by playing the various Prism races against each other. Sotiris, one of the Amaranthine, must travel to Earth (the 'Old World') following the death of his sister. Meanwhile, Lycaste is a mortal, living on the Old World, who's fallen in love with Pentas, but who doesn't love him back. The arrival of an outsider into their small community changes Lycaste's life forever.

There is a huge amount of world-building going on here, especially in the early chapters of this book. It throws you right into the middle of things, with explanations only coming later. It makes for a difficult first half or so. It didn't help that this was the first book that I read after getting an e-reader for the first time, and although there's a search function, flipping around to reread something the context of what I've just read was much more difficult than it would be on paper.

However, even once I got past that and was into the main body of the story, I found it difficult. I didn't really care an awful lot about Lycaste for most of the book. I found him pampered, whiny and irritating. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he goes through a lot in the course of the book and develops as a character, but he's still not really fun to hang around with. Sotiris, our other main PoV character, doesn't really work for me for a different reason. He's an immortal, over twelve thousand years old. To him, the mortals are mayflies, and although he tries to protect Lycaste, his motives aren't pure. And I felt he remained a cipher for the duration of the book (although to be fair, it must be really difficult to write the mind-state of people that old).

The nominal adversary, Aaron, someone who lays claim to the throne of the Amaranthine by virtue of claiming to be older than anyone else, is mostly a shadow figure, only gaining any solid definition in the final pages of the book. But his motivations remain opaque.

Although the pace picked up a lot towards the end of the book, I'm afraid I just don't feel invested enough to read the rest of the series.

(I got a copy of this book for free from NetGalley[1] in exchange for an honest review)

[1] The author messaged me on GoodReads, *goes to check* good grief, two years ago, and asked if I'd like to review the book. Many apologies for how long it's to read and review it!

Although I loved the blurb of this book I didn't get more than a third of the way through it. I just didn't care about any of the characters- they were too elite and had all lived so long that they had no passion left in them. The war scenes were confusing and still gave me no characters to care about.

Infortunately, I had to put this book down after 25% because I wasn't enjoying at all. I was very confused and I couldn't understand what was going on at all. The worldbuilding was interesting but maybe a bit too ambitious or just not very clear: so many races, characters and storylines were introduced at the same time and I couldn't keep track of everything. The writing was good so I will watch out for Toner other works in the future, The Promise of the Child being his debut book, his style might improve quite a bit in the future and it was interesting, just a bit too complex for me.
Thank you for the opportunity to read this book.

I do not recall ever abandoning a book before as a DNF. I have persevered for around 20% of The Promise of The Child, in ebook format, which represents around 120 pages. It has no appeal to me whatsoever. What I have read is beyond my understanding. Sorry Mr Toner, not for me.

Really wanted to review it but I lost a lot of my phones contents including an ebook of this book. Contacted the author to ask if he'd like to send me the book so I could review it but haven't heard from him since. Sorry! The book sounds great but if only I could get my hands on them...

I'm sorry, but after fighting through the first few chapters, I couldn't bring myself to care enough to finish it.

Provided to me by Tom Toner and NetGalley in return for a review.

Fabulous climax, terrifically relaxed and gentle first half, great puzzles and extraordinary variety. It seems slow and confusing to begin, perhaps better chapter segmentation and interleaving would help, but for a first novel, a triumph!

In the early parts of the book, we see short segments and events concerning several characters. These are interesting, but are then mostly abandoned to later parts of the book. A good editor would have paced these disparate stories better, interleaving them with the other characters and events of the book. They are good, but the focus is uneven.

The main first half of the book concerns Lycaste, a gentle and somewhat timid young man, living in an almost idyllic part of the world. Although this is beautiful world- and character-building, I would think that perhaps this should have been a short novella or side story, as James S.A. Corey has done with several characters in The Expanse series: Background novellas on their past lives.

We see several other characters, but their relation to the book as a whole is unclear until the final 1/3 or even 1/4 of the book. It's all interesting, and again the world-building is wonderful, but we feel lost.

In the middle of the book, we see more of Lycaste and changes in his situation and life, his confidence and outlook.

After this, two of the main characters' paths cross, and we begin to see the books epic as a whole.

And the final part of the book is really very good suspense, battle and political manoeuvrings.

Because this is a first novel by Toner, I heartily recommend this, but you must be committed to reading the whole, substantial book to find the real rewards.

I will definitely be reading The Weight of the World, the sequel (continuation, really) soon.

Some notes and updates as I read:
8% It's very, very hard for new authors to get noticed these days, regardless of the quality and originality of their work. So far, I am extremely happy to continue this fine book. Net galley provided it, but this is Quality work truly worthy of purchase. Well done so far, Tom.

10% Quote from the book: "Sometimes Lycaste would sit at his favourite spot, beneath the tall windows of the third tower, its vista encompassing the sea and the hills as well as the far-off blue haze northwards. Not even the highest tower could show you all that, its own view obscured by its position between the other four outposts. In the evening, the sun’s rays slanted crimson into that top room as the flowers wailed, and he wondered if his uncle in all his years had ever felt the same peace and contentment as Lycaste did, sitting quietly and alone in that airy chamber."

12% This is a lovely book, with a wonderful variety of characters and cultures. What a surprise! Love it. Finally getting more time to invest is this rich, complex, wonderful book.

31% The more I read, the more impressed I am with this book. Confident, complex, extraordinary for a first novel. Highest recommendation.

37% Quote from the book: "It was like growing tall enough to reach the building blocks of reality and discovering they were chipped and shoddily painted, a crude message or drawing scrawled up there for good measure, nothing more."

50% Surprise meeting of two of the main characters today. Very nice with great possibilities.

59% Quote from the book: "Corphuso’s first fully formed emotion after realising his device worked was one of profound fear. It raised the implications that there might, after all, be a God...."

1 star

Ok, so I actually had a couple of other reviews lined up to write before this, but I feel I need to talk about this one now. I'm usually a fan of darker books, I don't tend to get turned off by violence, or gore, or things that are just plain weird, but I do have a real bugbear with the unnecessary use of sexual violence…that, and books without a single female character of note.

So, the book…

It's touted as an epic space opera in the style of Banks or Reynolds, and it is pretty big…but also wallowing and lacking direction. We follow the POVs of a good ten or so different characters throughout the story, but only two that you'll actually have any interest in. It's basically set in our universe but approximately 12,000 years in the future. Humans left earth, some became the immortal Amaranthine, others evolved into strange Prism races, all seeming to be at war with one another. The Amaranthine, being immortal, ended up holding power, but a power that seems to be waning as infighting weakens their society.

Chapters leap around a bit, there's one set in 14th century Prague that seems to be literally never mentioned again, a couple in the 20th century Mediterranean that turn out to be dreams, and most set in the 147th Century. I'm sure that some of the more superfluous seeming chapters may be important in later books, but since I found them horrendously dull and pretty irrelevant I won't be reading the later books to find out.

This book could have done with some serious streamlining. I know it was supposed to be some grand space opera, but it wallowed in a way that the greats, the Herbert's and the Bank's did not.

Lycaste, the main POV for the novel, is a member of a colour changing race of giants living on Earth. The blurb describes him a 'lovesick recluse'. What that doesn't tell you is that he spends the entire book bemoaning the fact he has been friendzoned, and basically ends up trying to kill the man that his 'beloved' loves instead. I also really did not like that his 'reclusiveness' and the fact he is generally unlikeable seems to be 'explained away' by him being on the autistic spectrum…seriously, if you're going to try and write an autistic character, maybe talk to some autistic people beforehand and don't make already rare autistic characters into gross stereotypes. Needless to say, I didn't like how Lycaste's character was handled at all. There was some really cruel ableist language chucked around that could really hurt readers on the autistic spectrum.

The second POV that gets the most page space is Sotiris, a 12,000 year old Amaranthine, who originally lived his life in contemporary Cyprus. Personally, I think this entire book would have been much more interesting and much more readable if Sotiris had been the main character. I want to read books about amoral space Immortals, not whingy young men (well, giants) from Earth. Sotiris also gets the most interesting, and least offensive plot line. I'm going to sit here and mourn the epic story that could have been.

So, what is wrong with this book…

Whilst the inclusion of rape, sexism, homophobia and ableism in a book isn't in itself a red flag, how it is dealt with, and whether it is given the grief it deserves in book, really is.

I mentioned the problematic depiction of a character on the autism spectrum earlier, and the fact that the book is just generally too long and poorly paced, but there's more.

There are only a handful of named female characters in this enormous book and pretty much all of them either get raped or die…sometimes both. There's even an attempt to explain away the lack of older female Amaranthine by saying they all 'go senile' earlier than the men…which doesn't follow medical statistics at all, but, well, you do you. Also, I'm not going to go into detail about it here because I know it could hurt people, but the character I mentioned earlier, the one who doesn't love Lycaste, literally…I'm not sure the author really intended it to be this way…but it reads like a friendzone revenge fantasy . I had to skip that part entirely, it was so gross and hurtful and unnecessary. All I'll say is that it involved pregnancy and sexual assault…

There's also some really rampant and completely out of place homophobia in this book. One character goes on a rant about how he thinks it's disgusting that two men loved one another, just, out of nowhere, for no real reason. Later, a character is goaded by another character that he's a 'pretty man' and 'gay', as if it's a bad thing?? Then later some dude, that looks like a kid, drugs Lycaste and tried to sleep with him?? Why a) are any of these scenes necessary and b) how did no-one read any of this and think 'maybe this is a little bit homophobic?'

As I mentioned earlier, you can put the most horrible, disgusting content in your books as long as you justify in text that the actions are abhorrent. You're allowed to make points, to use shock and horror, as long as it doesn’t read like torture or revenge porn. Using rape to make a character look like a monster is maybe not advised but possible, however, take care with context! If you're writing a book and you don't take care not to romanticize that act, then you've written something that actively damages rape victims of any gender.

Conclusion…

This a big book with an interesting plotline and envious scope…but it rolled some critical fails when it came to nuanced use of gendered violence. As a woman, specifically a queer woman, this one was not for me.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Gollancz Publishing for a copy in return for an honest review.

Toner wrote a great book akin to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's "The Long Earth" trilogy. Certain aspects of the story are told through various perspectives and their individual timelines and as things keep getting complex and the stakes get higher you'll be gripping these pages refusing to let go.

Much as I found the premise fascinating, I could not ultimately connect with the story or the characters: there is just too much information and at the same time not enough background to digest it; the characters sound more like exercises in painstaking detail rather than people. I could sense that there was a great deal of ambition in this work, and I could appreciate that, but still the story remained distant, and I like to be immersed in on to really enjoy what I was reading. This novel might be appreciated more for its aesthetic sense than its narrative qualities, in my opinion, and readers with tastes different from mine might appreciate it more than I did.

It's hard to talk about this book without spoiling the things that I particularly liked having sprung on me with no spoilers! But. This series is set in the far future, and I mean far; it's the 147th century. And what I find really interesting (and plausible) is that in this time, humans have fractured (either through evolution or deliberate genetic manipulation, it's not clear) into a number of very different sub-species - like, think about how different dog breeds are, but they are all still dogs. It's a bit hard to tell the players without a scorecard, even though (possibly because) Toner tends to do the epithet thing and refer to characters sometimes by name, sometimes by race, but there are three main groups: The immortal Amaranthine (the oldest are referred to as Perennials) who appear to be Homo sapiens evolved into essentially superbeings, needing no food or water, not aging, able to move objects with their minds, capable of interplanetary teleportation (which has the interesting constraint that it depends on magnetic fields, so it's not unlimited x to y, which I find - not exactly plausible, but less handwavy) and so on, but also sharply limited in their sensory capacities, and with a tendency to go mad; the Melius, who turn out to have a number of subspecies, most of which are very tall and elongated, who change their skin color rather than wearing clothing, and who seem to mostly live on a single planet; and the Prism, which comprises a wide number of species (the Vulgar, the Pifoon, the Zelioceti and more) that tend to be smaller in stature, and are spread out across the "Firmament", inhabited space.

Functionally (or symbolically) the Melius seem like historical people, most of them tied to their home, unaware of the larger universe of peoples around them on other worlds. The ones who live closest to the seat of their government are venal and pompous, the worst of Roman-style excess; the ones who live farthest are like simple rural peasants. The Prism races are the futuristic SF peoples in pressure suits and spaceships. The Amaranthine are the masters of everything, who move between worlds with a thought. The Amaranthine Emperor is going senile, and the Amaranthine are divided over the man who wants to take the throne: Aaron the Long-Life, the Pretender, someone who may be the oldest Immortal - who may not even actually be an Amaranthine.

The story mostly follows three characters, each of different species, toward their eventual intersection. Each thread has dazzling worldbuilding, wide cast of characters, and not much exposition, so it's easy to get lost. But once things start happening (about a third of the way through the book), most details are filled in or at least can be inferred from the text. The actual writing is very much to my taste, richly descriptive without being irritatingly flowery (except of course, those damned epithets). I enjoyed the complexity and inventiveness of this universe (and I'd love to give details but it's more fun to read unspoiled, I think; there is one particular reveal which, when I realized what was coming, made me grin with glee), but I think it's difficult to get absorbed in until about the 40% mark, and the end is very much only the end of the first book of a trilogy.

I wanted to like this book but just could not get into it. it was, I think, just a little too much.

How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man

The Promise of the Child was one of those impulse books bought because I’d attended a festival (Gollancz festival October 15th 2016 I think) with the author in attendance and I liked the sound of both him and his debut novel; I have no regrets for purchasing this book on impulse unlike some of my impulse buys.

I think, personally, that 100 pages is all you get to grab me, if your book fails to grab me by then there’s a likelihood that I’ll abandon it sooner rather than later and I will admit I came so incredibly close to abandoning at about 80 pages because the book hadn’t grabbed me enough to keep me interested – I am glad I didn’t and persevered to the 100 page mark as shortly after my thoughts to abandon the book picked up massively.

The book is understandably a little confusing in places, sometimes a touch frustrating also but the world building was brilliantly done. It’s the 147th century and there are so many species of creature as to overload a new reader – which I will admit, I am and yes, it did happen – but there’s a wonderful glossary at the back of the book which for the first 150 pages or so I kept flicking backwards and forwards between to understand what it was I was reading. Tom also kindly answered my random Twitter message about the Melius – a giant non-reptilian chameleon-esque creature that wear colours instead of clothes (can I get a hell yeah?) and he’s such a nice guy (Tom, not the Melius, though they are quite nice too) he also suggested that the glossary would basically be my new best friend and no truer words have ever been spoken.

The characters were great – three main characters and a few main side characters that got a little more page time that you’d expect a secondary character to get.

Lycaste – a Melius who has been blessed/cursed with good looks and a soft heart.
Sotiris – an Amaranthine approximately 12,000 years old who mourns the death of his sister and plots to stop the man determined to become Emperor.
Ghaldezuel – a Lacaille knight of the stars who must steal the object that the Pretender will stop at nothing to obtain.
Each character had their own little quirks which didn’t deter from their overall character view but merely added to it. Lycaste for example is really soft hearted in the beginning but then another male encroaches on what he considers his territory and he flips – he’s a totally different man from how I’d gotten used to him and what I liked was that this new Lycaste continued throughout the rest of the book – he became infinitely more “masculine” than the hermit Lycaste of the beginning of the book.

For a debut novel the writing style was fresh if just a touch wordy, a lot of new words and styles of words specifically designed for The Amaranthine Spectrum world and though they’re long, and do put a bit of potentially unnecessary wordage in the book, I think that without them, The Promise of the Child wouldn’t have been the book it was.

On occasion, the book didn’t quite flow as well as I would have thought but it was made better by the general flow of it and the overall world building, characters and the plot line. The plot line was at first a bit confusing (I’d like to point out that I knew this going into the book and that this is no detriment on the book as a whole) but once it hit past the 100 page mark the plots stabilised and became their own individual side plots mixed together to make the one big plot.

The ending of the book threw me for a loop as I didn’t expect that ending in the slightest. It didn’t seem to match up with the beginning of the book where a random kid is taken by the Pretender and you don’t really hear about this child for the rest of the book. Then BAM! Dinosaur.

Yes. Dinosaur.

The book is perfectly spacey and sci/fi but it has that sweet touch of fantasy with the seemingly random designed creatures and alien species.

In all, this was a good book and I’d recommend it.

When I was first shown this book, I was impressed with the level of interest and praise that it has received, and by some recognizable names in the industry too. This made me keen to delve into it myself. Even though it's classified as space opera, the synopsis sounded to me very much like what I call "science-fantasy", a universe where things appear more mystical and magical than technological and where hard sci-fi is quite scarce. The closest thing to this description that I've read would probably be Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, a universe that I enjoyed a lot.

Set thousands of years in the future, this story takes the idea that humanity has continued to evolve, and has also produced a number of sub-species. At the top of the heap are a section of humanity called the Amaranthine, a very long-lived group who have created a huge interstellar empire in which Earth (known as The Old World) is still central. The rest of the "human" species comes in the shape of the Prism, who have a number of forms, are more primitive than the Amaranthine.

I won't begin an analysis of the plot or the characters, partly because there are many other reviews that have done this, and also partly because it came as a bit of blur to me. I found myself skimming portions of the text for a considerable amount of the book. It's written with an elegant artistic style, and while I don't know much about the technicalities of the English language, I can recognize the skill of the author here. The only problem is that I'm not turned on by that sort of thing, I like it simpler, less "flowery" as it were. I'm technical-thinking and matter-of-fact which means that I found this book to be not all that entertaining. Intellectually stimulating for some I have no doubt, but I tired of the embellished prose.

However, what I do see, as many other readers also do, is a new author on the scene who will probably fit in nicely with the likes of Reynolds, Banks, Hamilton and others of the genre. I'm sure he'll be around for some time.

Overall, I'd call this book a technically skillful execution of a complex story, within a fantastic universe. It just lacks enough entertainment value for my tastes, which unfortunately meant that it didn't do it for me.

4/5 for concept
5/5 for execution
2/5 for entertainment
= 3.7 out of 5